Gerrit Cole will be out for the season. For Yanks, is that a "death sentence"?
An even darker air of dread blanketed Yankees spring training on Monday, as dismal, murky and rainy as the Florida morning was.
That was so because the club's top pitcher, Gerrit Cole, seemed set for season-ending surgery. Tommy John surgery is rather common in baseball when elbow pain like the kind Cole spoke of over the weekend develops. Bad news also seemed unavoidable when it came out that Cole had left Florida and traveled to California for a second evaluation.
Therefore, even if Cole's recent experience offered some hope—just last year he recovered from a spring training elbow problem, avoided having surgery, and returned to a big-league mound before summer—the prevalent view around Yankees camp was clearly negative.
And at 6:15 p.m., once the heavens had turned blue and everyone had returned home, the Yankees broke the devastating news: Cole will have Tommy John surgery on Tuesday. He won't pitch in 2025.
A Yankees club returning off the first World Series run since 2009 suffers a terrible setback. Cole healed from his now-foreboding elbow problem, so he didn't debut until June 19 last year; nonetheless, he gained his stride by mid-August and was his normal dominant self during the Yankee October run.
Following the club's heartbreaking loss in Game 5 of the World Series, in which Cole committed a pivotal error on an infield dribbler, the Yankee ace started his throwing routine far earlier than in past winters.
This approach, which many other pitchers use, is based on the belief that resting the arm for a long period of time can raise the possibility of injury when throwing resumes.
At least partly driven by his arm problems from the previous spring, Cole changed his summer workouts. And arriving at camp, he had a good attitude about his health.